


Think of the Children

by mllemaenad



Series: Joanna Hawke [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 23:48:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3588498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mllemaenad/pseuds/mllemaenad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Children are taken to the Circle when their magic manifests – sometimes they may be as young as six. So what became of the apprentices when Kirkwall's Circle fell?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Think of the Children

The door was shaking. So were the children. They were beyond weeping.

 

Some of them they’d brought with them from the front hall: older boys and girls who’d insisted on joining the fight – and whom they hadn’t had the luxury of turning away. Most of them they’d found gathered in a dormitory, not ten feet from where a rage demon was busy ripping out a Tranquil woman’s heart.

 

One of them – probably the oldest – had had a candlestick for a weapon.

 

“Why not magic?” Fenris had asked.

 

“They’re _Templars_. What’s the point?” the girl had replied, her voice dripping with scorn. She looked about twelve. She sounded about sixty.

 

The apprentices were supposed to be gone by now. They’d sent people, a couple of the steadiest of the Enchanters, to evacuate them. But they had died before they’d got here, or been possessed, or driven away. At this point, who could say? Regardless, the children were still here, and they were running short on mages to defend them.

 

So it was their job. Anders had led them to this place, quick and sure. It was little more than an oversized cupboard, but apparently the ancient Tevinters had firmly believed that even the humblest of rooms should be built like a combination of vault and mausoleum: the door was thick and solid, and they’d built a barricade of three-legged chairs and splintered tables to strengthen it. Better yet, there was a passageway here that led to the coast: one of the many once used by slaves and smugglers and escaped mages to get from the Gallows to the outside world. It had been sealed up, years ago, but bricks and mortar didn’t come with magical resistance just because Templars had laid them down: a barrage of spells had broken it open again. There might be giant spiders down there, or undead, or even dragonlings, but it was the only hope these children had.

 

That had been the plan: open up all the escape routes at once, knowing that there were too many for the Templars to guard all of them. A sizeable force, including Hawke and her people, had stayed in the Gallows as a distraction – tempting Meredith to throw all of her might at the front gate. Everyone else had run. Some of them would find Templars waiting for them at the end of their tunnels, and be cut down as they stepped out onto seashore or a city street, but _some of them_ would get free.

 

Surviving an invocation of the Rite of Annulment was supposed to be impossible, so even saving a few lives was worth something. But somehow, in Kirkwall, no plan ever went right.

 

The battering ram struck again, and the door shuddered alarmingly. A dozen mages had died trying to burn that thing or blow it apart, but the Templars knew their business: they’d closed ranks and brought up their shields. It wasn’t even scorched.

 

“Hawke,” said Aveline, tensely, “that’s not going to hold much longer.” She’d discarded her shield and was holding her sword awkwardly in both hands. Orsino had taken out a handful of Templars before he’d lost control back in the entry hall, but he’d also almost torn Aveline’s right arm from her shoulder. Anders had put his hand on it, warm and bright with magic, and she could use it again – but she still gritted her teeth against the pain every time she swung her blade.

 

“I know,” said Hawke. She’d been almost blind with weeping, earlier, but she could see again now. Everything felt cold and far away. She hadn’t felt like this since Ostagar, waking in a pile of bodies with Carver sheltered beneath her, kicking hard at the darkspawn hands that clutched at her, shaking her brother back to consciousness and running on legs that would barely hold her upright. It had been hours, that day, before anything around her had felt real. She wondered now if anything ever would again.

 

She gestured at Varric and Anders, arrayed on either side of her behind a row of toppled tables. “First three through the door we shoot down. After that, you, Fenris and Isabela keep them off us if you can; we’ll maintain fire. If everything fails, Merrill and Bethany bring the ceiling down. At least that should finish them as well. Keep the children at the back and _keep them moving_.”

 

Aveline nodded, and gripped her blade tighter.

 

“Shit,” Isabela muttered at Aveline’s side; she looked as though she’d filled a tub with blood and dived in. “Shit, shit, I know, watch-your-mouth-in-front-of-the-children-Bela – _shit_.”

 

They were sending the children out in threes: one older one to protect two smaller ones, with enough space between the groups that, if Templars were out there, some of them might be able to retreat. They’d run out of the older apprentices a while back – the sixteen and seventeen year olds who maybe stood half a chance – and were down to using adolescents to protect babies.

 

To that end, Bethany was holding an impromptu self-defence class in a back corner.

 

“Can you make fire?” she asked, showing them the flame that hovered an inch above her rough Warden glove. “Good,” she went on, when most of them copied her. “I’m proud of you. Keep your hands away from your clothes and your hair so you don’t get scorched. Throw that at anything that comes at you, then start again. Keep the little ones close.”

 

One of the boys couldn’t. He’d get a spark between his fingers, and then it would fail, as though magical fire could lack air or fuel. The effort of it – no doubt combined with fear and frustration – was making his hands tremble violently, more so than any of the others. Bethany put a solid torn-off table leg into his fingers, and wrapped her own hands around his to still them. “Use that if something grabs at you or them,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how you fight, as long as you keep them safe.”

 

The boy nodded.

 

 _“Maker,”_ Anders breathed, to Hawke’s right, and she turned quickly towards him. He was grey faced, as if he’d died back in Lowtown after all, and staring at the child as if seeing a ghost or a demon.

 

On any other day, she’d have gone to his side, taken his hand. Now she couldn’t leave her place. They were positioned just so, to cover as much of the room as possible. If she moved, and they broke through, she’d be giving the Templars an opening. “ _Some things are more important,”_ he’d said. She’d agreed. Well – time to prove it.

 

“Anders?” she called, sounding sharp with concern. That was good, she thought. It meant everything she felt was still in there somewhere, even if she couldn’t reach it.

 

His head snapped around at the sound of her voice, and after a moment of wandering, his eyes met hers. “I _knew_. But I never thought …”

 

Hawke wondered if she looked like that: half here and half somewhere else, seeing horrors beyond horrors, and at the same time seeing nothing at all. She thought she probably did. Probably they all did. “I know,” she said simply. “Hold on.”

 

He turned his gaze back to the door, and a ball of light appeared in his hand. “I’m still here, love. Let them come. They won’t get through.”

 

“Out of time, Hawke!” Merrill called, from across the room. She’d been dividing the apprentices into groups, sending them down the stairs into the darkness, then counting to twenty and starting all over again.

 

She was right, too: the door buckled inwards, sprouting splinters like a wooden porcupine.

 

“Go on, _da’len_ ,” she said, passing a boy of no more than seven down into the arms of an older girl. “And don’t look back. There’s nothing scarier down there than up here. Well, _maybe_ the corpses but just think of them like people who are a bit grumpy when they wake up in the morning. And then set them on fire.”

 

Then she picked up her staff and stood beside Bethany, forming a last line of defence in front of the passageway. The children were on their own, now.

 

A hand, gauntleted, snaked through the hole in the door, exploring the mountain of junk they’d stacked against it.

 

“Gustaf!” Varric called, sounding anguished. “Rodina! Cassian! I know you’re out there. You’re better than this. Listen – it’s just kids in here, I swear. Not a staff between them. Just kids! You stay out there and there’s no reason for Bianca to get excited.”

 

The hand withdrew – but no one answered. Last week these had been Varric’s drinking buddies. Now they had _orders_. Orders, it seemed, meant a lot to a Templar. More than a few rounds of ale at the Hanged Man. Hawke drew back her bowstring, eyes fixed on the gap in their defences. She waited.

 

A final blow struck the door, and it shattered, taking most of their makeshift barricade with it.

 

The first through was a man of forty or so, grim faced and determined, his expression fixed like one who did not want to see what his hands were doing.

 

“Cassian!” Varric all but wailed as the man’s sword came up.

 

Hawke’s arrow took him in the throat, and he collapsed in a pool of blood and splinters. For a moment she thought of the first Templar she’d killed, nearly twenty years earlier. He’d come upon the Hawke children in the woods, purely by chance, and seen the glow of magic between Bethany’s childish fingers. Hawke’s hands had moved before her mind had had time to formulate a thought, and he had gone down the same way: a lucky shot from a frightened young poacher felling a trained warrior.

 

She thought how sick she’d felt, how sad and how horrified. She thought that it was probably for the best that right now she found it difficult to feel anything at all.

 

Then more Templars came in, stepping over the body of the first, and the fighting began again in earnest.


End file.
